After not meeting for over a year, a support group for those with Parkinson’s disease and their caregivers is resuming meetings next week.

Washington resident Julie Gentz started the group in 2019 with her husband Brian who had Parkinson’s, as a way to help support others going through the same experience locally. The group was going well until COVID-19 hit and they stopped holding in-person meetings. Julie says it was difficult for participants to meet virtually, “Unfortunately over the span of the time since we started and were picking back up again, we lost about six of our nine members. Not from attrition, but we lost them to Parkinson’s or the effects of it.”

One of the members lost was Julie’s husband, who passed away this April. Julie feels that as a way to carry on Brian’s legacy and to put all her years as a caregiver to use, it’s time to form the group again, “Sometimes people decide that they want to walk away and they’ve just had it and they don’t want to hear anymore, and everybody deals with things in their own way and that’s totally different. But it has always been my philosophy that if you go through something really hard in life that you can teach someone else. I went through a divorce before I married Brian and it was awful, and I tried to share that with people in ways that I can to help other people go through some of the same kind of things that I did. And I feel like if I don’t do that, that I’ve just wasted a really awful experience, and by sharing and helping others I can turn it around and into something that is positive.”

Gentz says residents who are diagnosed with other chronic diseases that require a caregiver are also welcome to join this group, which will be meeting the last Thursday of every month from 3-4:30 p.m. at the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Washington. The first meeting is on May 27th, and you can learn more from Gentz during today’s Halcyon House Washington Page on air and at kciiradio.com. For questions about the group, contact 319-461-1403 or julie.gentz@gmail.com.